After the guns of August, what road is best?

Now that the guns have fallen silent, empathy, not ethnocentrism, should be the priority in the search for peace

By Saad Eddin Ibrahim

The Middle East is a place where the dust hardly ever settles. When it occasionally does, even for a short interval -- as UN Resolution 1701 for cessation of hostilities in Lebanon seems to be holding -- it is time to take stock of events in the hope that a responsible debate may influence those in power.

Let's start with the US. President George W. Bush has been short on neither initiatives nor catchy slogans and acronyms. Recent years are littered with them: "Global War on Terror" (GWOT), "Road Map," "Middle East Partnership Initiative" (MEPI), "Broader Middle East and North Africa" (BMENA) -- originally "Greater Middle East Initiative" (GMEI) -- "Democracy Assisted Dialogue" (DAD), and so on. His latest reverie, envisioned in the thick of the recent fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, was the New Middle East (NME), with US clients Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia serving as the pillars of regional order.

But like all his previous initiatives since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington almost five years ago now, the NME ran into trouble from the outset. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced its birth while rejecting an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon. Her poor timing made the initiative appear heartless, as thousands of civilians were being uprooted, killed or maimed by Israel's efficient but ruthless artillery and air force.

This so embarrassed the three Arab NME partners that each raced to distance itself from the US-sponsored initiative. Saudi Arabia, which had remained silent for nearly two weeks, did so with a US$500 million contribution to rebuilding devastated areas of Lebanon and another billion to support Lebanon's threatened currency.

Egypt's heir-apparent Gamal Mubarak followed suit in the fourth week of the fighting by heading a 70-member delegation on a solidarity visit to Beirut. But, rather than earning him the respect of an outraged Egyptian public, revelations in the opposition press that his plane had to obtain a safe passage and authority to land from the Israelis garnered only howls of derision. As for the US, anything it touches in the Middle East has become radioactive, even for longstanding clients and friends.

In the course of maneuvering to delay the UN ceasefire, Bush and Rice continually reiterated the need for a Security Council resolution that deals forcefully with "the roots of the problem." Of course, for them and for Israel, this was Hezbollah and the need to eradicate or at a minimum disarm it and force its fighters to a safe distance from settlements and towns in northern Israel.

While this is a reasonable demand, the rest of the Middle East -- and, indeed, much of the world, including Europe -- regard the root cause of the conflict as Israeli intransigence and arrogance, together with the US' blind support for it. Both the US and Israel have cited foot-dragging in implementing UN Resolution 1559, which calls for disarming all non-state actors in Lebanon and the deployment of government forces all the way to the southern border. But for years the US and Israel have not uttered a word about the dozens of UN resolutions, going back as far as Resolution 49 on partition in 1947, which called for the establishment of distinct Arab and Jewish states on roughly half of Mandated Palestine.